Centuries ago, the consumption of tortilla in our country has had a preferential place in the nourishment of our people.
There have been a lot of methods and technics for manufacturing it, so the milling and flouring industries have done, day by day, immeasurable efforts to render more efficient the production processes of nixtamal, dough, flour and finally the tortilla.
In all nixtamalization cases, the ingredients have always been whole corn grain, water, lime and temperature, Preserving the nutritive elements that the grain contains, just increased as regards the food value through calcium ion contained in the lime.
In the traditional processes for producing it, there are the home or domestic nixtamalization, the nixtamalization performed in each mill of the named national milling industry, considered as a tradition in our country, which takes care of cooking the corn until obtaining the nixtamal, then grinding it in the typical stone mill converting the same into dough, to be later delivered to the tortilla shops, where warm tortillas are elaborated and offered to the consumer.
Our constant technical development since about 50 years ago, originated the national flour industry in Mexico, which takes care of cooking the corn and obtaining the nixtamal, grinding it this time in iron mills and drying it, obtaining a precooked flour, ready to be directly delivered to the tortilla shops, where flour and water are just mixed to obtain the dough with which the hot tortilla is elaborated and offered to the consumer in the same manner.
Afterwards, about five years ago as the supply needs changed, the tortilla manufacturers observed the need of providing their product permanently and without any time restriction or availability to the consuming public, they designed the first packed tortilla system, this time in cool condition, constantly available on displaying shelf with an average life of one hundred hours.
However, in order to achieve preserving the tortilla appropriately, according to the old fashioned nixtamalization technics, which were already installed, it was necessary to add large quantities of preserving materials, cohesive gums, carboxymethylcellulose, decolorating acids and a number of chemical products that were inconvenient and even toxic most of the times, when consumed by human beings.
Following the new trends of modern nourishment and the most recent discoveries as regards human health, we have achieved a perfect nixtamalization, through a new technology that preseves the protein, reduces the fat, and increases the fiber, in a longer lasting tortilla and without any kind of chemical additives.
At first we have been able to grind the corn, cooking it then, separately doing the same thing with the corn pericarp or fiber, thereby allowing to increase the contact surface with the lime, until achieving a reaction essentially up to a 100% yield, later mixing the two cookings, being possible to obtain a homogeneous material having a pH between 8 and 9 without free radicals, which does not essentially require the addition of any chemical product for preserving it due to its alkaline condition, its duration being twice than any other material where the acid or alkaline conditions have been the object of variations or exposures to uncomplete reactions.
Because of this new technic, the broken corn grain may be profitable, which has been considered as impossible to be subjected to nixtamalization by the milling and flouring industries until now, in addition to the fact of taking advantage of the corn pericarp or fiber, which are at present thrown away by such important industries, which constitutes a novel utilization of materials considered as useless in every process for obtaining tortilla, complemented at the same time, just with water, lime and temperature.
The results, in an average of 25 tests performed with common tortillas from different factories, done with different kinds and varieties of corn, compared to those of this new technology, have been considered in the next table:
in which is appreciated that the protein value is the same, that the fat has been reduced in a 50% and that the fiber is increased three more times than the normal value used up today.